Sober Judgement?

 What does it take to stay calm in today’s society?  The news seems full of irrational acts by people whom we would think would be rational.  Shootings of store owners because of the flags they fly, people protesting measures that are supposed to protect them from forest fires, even a plane in Russia mysteriously crashing.  How do people justify such choices?

Making sober judgements, as Paul asks us to do, is based on God’s priorities and not humanity’s priorities.  It is not easy either.  We don’t want to burden ourselves with difficult decisions that are logical, because there don’t seem to be any simple or straightforward decisions that are clear.  We look at global warming and agree that something must be done to lower our emissions, yet many politicians still say it is a myth.  Other folks may admit that climate change is real after watching the fire in Hawaii, but then they will say that there’s nothing they can do about it, so let’s keep making profits while we still can.  That doesn't sound like a sober judgement based on God’s priorities.

God’s priorities are to help each other become the body of Christ, a healing community based on ministering to one another.  God’s priorities are that we witness to the world that there are ways of being that do not build up greed and selfishness at the expense of others. God’s priorities are communities of faith that are humble, where everyone reflects on being a holy sacrifice to God.

How hard it is to be humble, in this world that rewards those who brag about being the best debaters, the most likely to start a revolution, or those who amass the greatest fame and fortune in the shortest amount of time.  Jesus knew that struggle, I think, when he turned to the disciples and said, “Okay, give me the scoop.  What’s the gossip about me?”

Jesus knew that he had disturbed the powerful leaders enough that he needed a vacation from Jerusalem.  A few chapters back, Herod had chopped off the head of John the Baptist, so Jesus knew it was time to get out of Dodge.  And he was in Caesarea Philippi, a Roman town dedicated to the God Pan.  Sculptures like this one found in Pompeii, were scattered all through the town.  Pan, goat hooves and all, was shown teaching youth the pan pipes and inspiring panic in those he disliked.  And yes, panic, the very opposite of sober judgements, was named after this deity.  Idols like this were challenging for his followers who followed a God that was never limited to a stone image.  Having a conversation about Jesus’ reputation in front of these sculptures would have had the disciples thinking about how different their faith was from the Romans who had invaded their country.

Peter got it.  The contrast between Jesus who was prepared to sacrifice his very life, who preached compassion and justice to everyone he met, with Pan, would have been stark.  Pan represented the ultimate in conforming to the world, a pleasure-seeking, powerful god who didn’t care about others unless they were pretty.  Contrast this to the tradition that Peter and the others had grown up with, a God that is Holy Mystery, beyond complete knowledge, and above perfect description, one that was always seeking relationship.  Not for God’s pleasure, also unlike Pan, but to mend the broken and reconcile the estranged.  God was seeking relationship to build a society where orphans and widows were not forced to become homeless beggars, where power was not imposed by swords and roadblocks but by respect and wisdom. “Who do you say I am”, Jesus challenged, asking Peter to rise above the gossip and come up with his own opinion. 

The lightbulb went off in Peter’s head!  Rather than being conformed to the world of Pan, Peter chose to align himself with his beloved rabbi Jesus, who had so much integrity, so much wisdom, so much power that it was like Peter was able to see God in him.  To Peter in that moment, Jesus was full of the promise of what human beings should be like if they were fully transformed into something that was perfect love.  Wow.

Who is Jesus in our lives?  Some of us may feel that he was a good teacher, and that’s true, and if you do, keep learning from his teachings.  The teachings are powerful, maybe even a little dangerous, and they will challenge you to continue to learn.  Some of us may feel he was a prophet, able to read the signs of the times and the culture of the people he met in ways that surprised those who met him.  Excellent, keep looking at the ways he reads our times even today.  Some may think he was a radical organizer, and he certainly was that, speaking truth to power with tremendous courage regardless of the personal cost he might experience.  And some might experience a sense of profound mystery and wonder when they reflect on who Jesus was.

Regardless of where we are in our understanding with Jesus, we are called to reflect on him.  Who is Jesus to me?  Who is Jesus to you?  That changes as we grow in our faith and is key to when someone asks us why we go to church.  Hopefully, Jesus models the kind of principle-centered human we want to be.  When Jesus is our role model, we can weather the storms of life as a community in ways that build resiliency and hope for ourselves and also all who know us.  It is our witness to the courage our faith gives us, and courage and hope is something the world needs now more than ever.  Let us reject the Pan god and the panic that he inspires, and embrace the sober, loving judgement that Paul, Peter and Jesus used to change the lives of many people around the world.  Amen.

The Outsider Woman: Matthew 15:10–28

Sometimes, all it takes is the lift of an eyebrow to challenge what someone else assumes is a truthful statement.  This sculpture of Mabel Gardiner Hubbard shows her lifting her eyebrow skeptically as if to say to her husband, “do you really believe in the nonsense you spouted just now?”

She was a feisty and intelligent woman who helped propel her husband to fame.  She also lived with a profound disability after developing scarlet fever as a child.  That disease destroyed so much of her inner ears that she not only became deaf, she lost her sense of balance and could not walk around at night without falling over. 

Despite her disability, she learned to read lips and speak several languages so well she could pass for a hearing person.  Mabel became a businesswoman, an entrepreneur, and so well known that her sculpture is in this park in Canada.

She wouldn’t take pity and she didn’t shy away from debate or learning.  And she had the kind of character that wasn’t afraid of speaking truth to power.

Remind you of anyone?  It’s easy to put her in the scene with the scripture reading from Matthew.  A woman, one of the dreaded Canaanites who had been at war with the Hebrew people since the time of Abraham and Moses, came to Jesus to ask for help.  Her pleas fell on deaf ears.  No one heard her, acknowledged her, pretended she was even in the same place with her.  Rather like the pan handlers found near tourist sites, she persisted in her calls for help.  No one wanted to make eye contact with her.  They probably all turned their backs on her rather than listening to her.  Nevertheless, she persisted.

Eventually, and doesn’t it almost sound almost reluctantly, Jesus engaged this outsider woman.  As a rabbi, he didn’t have to talk to this Canaanite, he didn’t even need to show her respect.  The easiest thing for him would be to have one of the disciples make her go away, or even simpler, move elsewhere until she gave up.

Lots of articles have been written about this story – was Jesus racist?  Or was he acting out a living parable to teach his disciples a lesson in radical acceptance?  It’s easy to take either side of that debate, and there is no conclusive evidence either way.

One thing that does stand out is the woman’s humbleness.  So often when we engage with someone who has a different opinion than us, we can quickly get defensive and angry.  When we don’t get what we want, we feel personally betrayed and disrespected.  Business experts and social scientists alike are raising concerns about the level of animosity in our society these days, and how social media seems to prevent honest conversations and understandings.  It’s far too easy to get caught up in fights online, and churches are not immune to this.  It is easy to type something at someone that we would never say in person.  And the level of conflict in our culture at this moment is so bad that everyone from politicians to journalists, jurors and judges are getting used to death threats and abusive language. 

It’s in our own neighborhoods, it’s in places where people have lost their homes to fires, it’s in places where people are waiting to return home. It's around dinner tables when global warming is being discussed, it’s in classrooms where concepts like neo-liberalism or political correctness is being discussed.  It’s in stores who have people pitching their tents on sidewalks in busy cities, and it’s on walls in Winnipeg covered in racist graffiti.  We don’t know how to take feedback without getting upset and we give feedback when no one has asked for it.

Jesus and the Samaritan woman had an encounter that could have become a terrible fight.  Jesus said something that was dismissive at best and confrontational at worst.  But the woman didn’t care.  She didn’t let the insult keep her from asking for what she needed.  She didn’t get on her high horse or go off in a huff.  She acknowledged that he might have a point, but her daughter’s health was more important than picking a fight or getting her feelings hurt.  She would do whatever it would take to help her daughter heal.  She didn’t take Jesus’ comments any more personally than the comedians on the radio show, “The Debaters”, which if you haven’t heard it, is worth a listen.  She probably lifted her eyebrow at him when she retorted, “even the dogs get crumbs.”

She knew that when we meet someone with different opinions than our own, it can be a moment for growth if we don’t let our egos get in the way.  And the other person’s point of view may well hurt our egos a little bit when we hear their story. 

But one piece of this story is where Jesus was.  He was not in Jerusalem or even Galilea.  He was in Sidon, a city in Lebanon, founded by Canaanites.  In other words, he was on her land.  Did he go there to hear other points of view?  To teach his followers, as Paul so eloquently put it, “there is no difference between Greek or Jew, all have the same Creator.”  This would be a lesson that they never forgot.  They were called to heal all who came to them, to have conversations with all even when they looked, sounded, or acted differently.

They were to enter into conversations humbly, and ready to have their most basic assumptions challenged.  Like the sculpture of Mabel Gardiner Hubbard, the women they talked to would challenge their stories, their theology, their assumptions about their place in the world and their understanding of God.  Most people have no idea who Mabel was.  But they all know the man in the sculpture, her husband whom she made famous.  Mabel pushed him out of his comfort zone by buying a train ticket for him and packed his bags and his latest invention and took him to a fair.  The invention changed the lives of us all.  That invention was the telephone, and her husband was none other than Alexander Graham Bell.  Without her contrary point of view, our world would look much different today.

There are times when we have something as urgent as a world-changing invention or a family member struggling with mental illness.  We may have to lift our eyebrows at people telling us we don’t need or deserve help.  And there may be times when we have someone come to us who needs our help and won’t take no for an answer.  May we recognize in those times that we are all God’s children, and pray so we can humbly hear each other into deeper understanding and deeper healing for us all.  Amen.

Throwing seeds around

 
There’s something satisfying in the smell of freshly mown lawn.  That green stretch of grass that lusciously fills our yards and breaks up the monotony of cement sidewalks is beautiful to behold.  But it takes a lot of work and a lot of seeds.  There’s aeration and raking and watering, and weeding, and heaven help you if you have dandelions, creeping Charlie or fairy rings.

There are neighborhoods where someone has decided to be, shall we say, more creative and less conventional in their yard.  The first time people decided to landscape their front yards with rocks or low-maintenance plants or even vegetable gardens, they were seen as odd and eccentric.  But for folks in BC this week, those creative landscapers might be the only ones happy with the state of their yards.  BC has a severe drought happening right now, and they aren’t the only ones.  The Southern US is suffering record-breaking heat waves and a heat warning alert was issued in of all places, the Yukon and Northwest Territories this week.  Even the Antarctic is seeing record-breaking temperatures in July despite it being the middle of winter for them. Wow.

Back in the 1980’s David Suzuki came and spoke to a teacher’s convention in Edmonton and told the teachers that human beings are very similar to frogs.  If you try to put a frog in a pot of boiling water, naturally, it will do everything it can to get out of the water.  But if you put it into a pot of room temperature water, and turn the heat up slowly, the frog will not jump out of the water even when it is dangerously hot.  The frog will boil to death.  Suzuki then went on to talk about greenhouse gasses and global warming, and of course he was treated as an alarmist who didn’t know what he was talking about. His words were like seeds that fell on rocky ground.

Fast forward 30 years and our glaciers are shrinking, the Antarctic ice cap is melting, the polar bears are starving because the ice they need to get to the seals is disappearing, and we still ignore the warnings of climate scientists.  Our politicians don’t have enough support and trust from the public to make the tough decisions that are needed to keep us frog-like humans alive. 

There are signs though that some of Susuki’s seeds were heard here and there.  There are more electric cars being driven even in Athabasca and Fort McMurray.  One enterprising fellow has enough solar panels on his farm that he is able to charge his car and was able to drive it all the way to Calgary and back.  The University of Alberta is discovering that sheep love paddocks with solar panels and still find enough forage, and one farm is growing a bumper crop of spinach under its solar panels.  Speaking of solar panels, where would you guess the largest solar panel farm in Canada is located?  Near Lethbridge, Alberta, yes, this very province!  It will produce as much energy as a nuclear power plant and covers the equivalent of 1,600 Canadian Football League fields.  That could be a lot of spinach and sheep as well!

So not every word of climate crisis has fallen on stony paths, as Jesus said.  Some seeds have put down roots, others are being choked by the conspiracy theorists, and others have been eaten by people who disparage any efforts to make a difference.  You know, the kind of people who say we can’t buy into solar energy because the rare metals are causing more environmental problems than the oil industry. Or that electric cars will never be practical in Alberta because of our long cold winters. They preach apathy and status quo while waiting for the perfect solution to be gift wrapped to us and handed over on a silver platter.  Something that will be easy and free.

In other words, they are holding out for a perfect lawn and don’t want to do anything other than a perfect lawn.  And they condemn anyone who has a dandelion or a fairy ring or an ant hill messing with their beautiful turf.

How does this relate to our scriptures today?  Jesus talked about the words of hope being choked by the weeds of the cares of the world and the lure of wealth.  This is as true today as it was in his day.  Only he didn’t have 24-hour news channels broadcasting the cares of the world.  He didn’t have scientists and flat earthers debating on social media. 

He did preach gardening to fishermen who were on the brink of starvation.  There’s a boat that was found by a team of archaeologists that dates back to around 50 AD when the Galilea lake was experiencing a drought.  The boat was covered in repairs and patches and damage.  There was no money for a replacement boat for the likes of Peter, James and John.  Thsee fishermen were competing with Romans that were depleting the fish stocks and threatening their livelihood with extinction.  That’s why the many stories of Jesus saying, “throw your nets on the other side”, were so important to them. 

Jesus taught that when we talk about things like our faith, or our concern about global warming, we are not to worry about how those words are received.  Some words will fall on deaf ears.  Some words will fall on angry ears and we know to walk away from those conversations.  But some of our words will land and take root and turn into action.  It takes deep spirituality to find the resiliency and hope to face our world.  It takes bold discipleship to have the courage to speak up and scatter our seeds to plant our imperfect lawns.  And it takes daring justice to chose ways to live with respect in creation in wise , loving and hopeful ways.  May we find time this summer to be deep, bold, daring seed planters for the sake of the God who created us and created this beautiful world that God so loved.  Amen.